“Hey,” I said to Jewel. “What do you think about all this, about Mom and Dad going?”
“I don’t know,” Jewel replied. She looked anxious. “I don’t like it, but I want Kaylynn to get better.”
“Me too,” I said. “Should we let them do this?”
She nodded, but it wasn’t a resolute or confident nod. “If anyone can save Kaylynn, they can.”
I smiled, grateful that she had agreed with me. We’re not always on the same page when it comes to important stuff. Now we were. Mom and Dad entered the room a short minute later, thin smiles on their faces.
“You look better,” Mom said. “Ready to go?”
They tossed me my clothes. I dressed. We left.
Infected or not, I was coming back for Kaylynn.
That night, after we’d left the healthcare center and returned to grandma’s house, Dad told us what Jewel and I had already overheard. We knew the clue on the radio would lead to a cure for Kaylynn, so Mom and Dad accepted the mission. They left the next morning. Black-Bandana Man picked them up in a white Dodge Ram. His older son, the one with the cleft chin, rode passenger. Cody came by to see them off, although he clearly had the face of someone who got left behind.
I wasn’t too worried. No one in the compound had Dad’s level of experience, but separating us from him and Mom didn’t set well with Jewel at all. And with Sam monitoring our every move, even more so.
Our parent’s plan included a state highway through Lincoln, and another through Kansas until they hit Kansas City, Missouri. But before they left, Dad gave me the keys to the Explorer and a duplicate map. He said if anything happened while they were gone, we were to take the car, follow the highlighted route and meet up with them. I’d never driven the Explorer.
I’m pretty sure Sam made sure no one said a word about the radio message, especially the blood tests that everyone had to take. It was an all-day affair, people lining up from every street, taking turns by rolling up their sleeves. Jewel and I had our blood tested the night before, so we stayed home—with a guard out front.
Since I’d nearly attracted twenty or so Vectors into David City, Sam had me placed under some kind of house arrest. Boredom tends to bring out the worst in me, and cooping us up in grandma’s house all day made me want to break the rules. Jewel found a way to sneak over the back fence of our house, giving us a great opportunity to grab Kaylynn’s bat from the ball park.
I knew Sam would kick us out if they caught us, but I didn’t care anymore. If Kaylynn was infected, I had to do my part, too. She wasn’t a mindless Vector set on eating every living thing like the rest of those monsters. Kaylynn was no monster. She was human. I didn’t know how, but we were going to free her.
A few minutes later, I found her bat laying on the grass. I picked it up and held it carefully. As I felt the weight of her wooden bat in my hand, I understood why she was elusive. She was infected—and she knew it all along. I would’ve kept my distance from others just as she had, fearful of infecting them. I wasn’t about to give up. In a different way, she’d already infected me.
“What were you two doing out here?” Jewel asked me as we walked back to the compound.
I shrugged. “Nothing, really. Just hanging out.”
Jewel’s face beamed with a wide smile. “Mmhmm.”
“We played baseball. I pitched. She hit. That’s it.”
“Did she catch what you were pitching?”
“Ask her when we finish Phase Two.”
The first phase of our plan—finding Kaylynn’s bat—went without a hitch. And no one had bothered to check on us after we’d left the house. After a small dinner of soup and stale crackers, we prepared to infiltrate the healthcare center. I had a hunch on where we would find Kaylynn, and our stuff—behind the guarded doors. Since the place was mostly vacant in the evening, that was our best bet, but we’d need a distraction to get inside without anyone noticing us.
I untied the knot on Chloe’s leash. Her tail went nuts, so excited that she nearly knocked the lamp over.
Just before sunset, Jewel grabbed Kaylynn’s bat.
I swallowed. Time to commence Phase Two.
“Where’re you going?” asked the guard out front.
I held up the end of Chloe’s leash. “For a walk.”
To our relief, the guy bought our story, not that it was a complete lie. We just didn’t say where we had planned to go. He told us to hurry back in half an hour. In the meantime, instead of guarding a house with no one inside, he left to check on something—whatever it was. If luck stayed on our side, we’d make it back long before then, and find some place for Kaylynn to hide.
Jewel and I bee-lined for the healthcare center.
Under the cover of dusk, we made sure to stay behind trees and parked cars to hide our approach. Two men left the building through the west entrance, where we had planned to enter. They just stood there, talking.
I removed the leash from Chloe’s collar. “Chloe.” I pointed at the guards. “Decoy.”
She sprinted for the entrance. The guards saw Chloe right away. She pawed at the glass doors and took off, heading south. I was worried that they wouldn’t fall for the bait, but then they followed her and tried to coax her by whistling. Jewel ran for it. I followed at her heels. Getting in was the easy part. Getting out required a second decoy. That was Jewel. She would approach the guards on our way out, ask if they’d found her dog, and keep them distracted while Kaylynn and I split.
Piece of cake.
I pulled at the first door handle to the health center that I could reach. We then slipped into a vestibule and opened the next door. The coast was clear. We walked down the halls. I listened, forcing myself to be more alert than usual. We made it to Radiology when someone pushed a pair of swinging doors open. I ducked behind a nurse station, pulling Jewel with me.
“She’s beginning to stir,” a woman said. “Should I give another one-hundred?”
“Make it two-hundred,” Sam replied. “The pathogen is resilient to sedatives.”
“Right,” the woman replied. “I’ll do that when I come back this way.”
“You’ve done enough for today,” Sam said. “I’ll take care of this.”
My jaw clenched, my nervous fear replaced by anger. They were giving sedatives to Kaylynn? That was really messed up. Talk about timing. Breaking Kaylynn out would be a lot easier if she wasn’t asleep. When the hall was quiet again, we made our way down the last stretch. We poked our heads around the next corner. An armed man stood in front of the restricted section. Kaylynn had to be on the other side of that door, but without a blind spot, we’d never slip past that guard.
Jewel walked ahead.
“What are you doing?” I whispered.
She pretended to ignore me. “Excuse me, sir. Do you know where the bathroom is?”
“You shouldn’t be here, kid,” the man said. “There’s no bathrooms here.”
Jewel did a panic dance. “Where can I find one?”
“Go straight, make a left and—shit, I know where to go, but”—he paused for a second, and then he sighed—“It’ll be quicker if I show you. Make it fast.”
“Okay! Thank you.” Jewel nodded at me and whispered from the corner of her mouth, “Hide!”
I dove behind a fake plant, worried and thankful for my sister’s quick brain. And thanks to Dad, she could fight off a wannabe security dude if she needed to. I entered the hallway again, like a ninja, and made my way through the forbidden door. The first thing I saw was another hall with a nurse station at the end. Labor and Delivery to the right—Surgery to the left. Following my gut, I veered right, where someone had scribbled Armory on a door in the middle of the hall.
Our swag had to be in there.
I opened the door with ease into some kind of in-patient common room with a large TV mounted on the wall. A pool table caught my eye in the back corner, next to a huge window with double-paned glass. Weapons covered nearly every inch of the green felt.
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br /> Getting our weapons back wasn’t exactly in the plan, but why not? Better safe than sorry. I just went after the ones that belonged to Jewel and me. I found her new rifle first and then I packed a couple boxes of 30.06 ammunition. It took me a minute to find my Berettas. Someone had put them in a gaming closet.
I had to keep moving, although I was relieved to be reunited with my little friends. There was no time to check them, so I grabbed a couple more boxes of .40 and .45 and zipped them in my backpack, just to make it heavier. After that I checked the hall before entering.
I checked the nurse’s station. Nothing but scattered papers and some keys. Keys unlock stuff, so I grabbed them and sprinted for the Nursery first. I searched the windows where people could look at their newborn babies. There were beds inside. Kaylynn was on one.
She seemed perfectly normal, lying still, except for the Velcro-restraints on her wrists and feet. And the door was locked. Overkill. I searched the keys until I found the right one. I twisted the lock and entered.
Kaylynn’s jaw dropped as I set down the rifle. “Hey,” I said. I wish I had said something cooler.
“Jay!” she cried. “What are you doing here?”
“Busting you out. What’ve they done to you?”
“Nothing . . . they’re just observing me, I guess.” I went to work on the restraints. They came off easily. “You shouldn’t,” she said. “We’re in enough trouble.”
“There’s a cure,” I said, deciding to come clean. I told her everything, including our plan to help her. “We heard it over the radio. My parents went to check it out.” I unfastened the belt at her waist and went for the ankles. “And Sam’s on her way to give you a sedative.”
“A seda-what?” That made her sit up. “Why?”
“She hasn’t?” I pulled the last restraint off.
Kaylynn shook her head. “What’s going on?”
I had no clue. I thought I had one, but the facts had changed. If the sedative wasn’t for her, then who?”
“I don’t know. Are you coming or not?”
“I . . . shouldn’t. I’m jinxed, remember?”
“You’re the luckiest jinx I’ve ever met.”
She stared at me with a so-you-know look in her dark blue eyes. She lowered her head and parted her bangs. She had a two-inch scar above her left ear. A Vector must have scratched her. “They got me a week after it all started,” she explained. “I thought I was dead, but . . . I didn’t turn. The people with me thought I was a miracle, but—I don’t know who or what I am now.”
I couldn’t find her clothes, so I tossed her my hoodie instead. When we left the nursery and went back for the exit, the doors opened. I pulled Kaylynn all the way across the front desk to the other side of hall as Sam entered the corner of my eye, holding a syringe.
She hadn’t noticed us yet.
There was only one place I could think of where she wouldn’t find us. I took Kaylynn’s hand, and we ran into Surgery together. We pushed the door open and entered a dark room. To our relief, Sam hadn’t raised the alarm. She would when she found Kaylynn missing.
Kaylynn tugged on my arm. She was pointing at an operating table in the center of the room. A body was lying on it, covered with a sheet. It was hooked up to more monitors and medical equipment than I’d ever seen. That’s saying something, since my mom’s a nurse.
The patient’s chest rose with slow, calm breaths.
Kaylynn stepped back. “Let’s get out of here, Jay.”
I should’ve listened to her, but I had to know what Sam was hiding. I neared the table and pulled the sheet off. A girl with pale skin turned her head and looked at me with those red Vector eyes. She was also strapped down, her mouth covered by an oxygen mask. She raised her head and snapped her jaws at us. Gray foam pooled around the corner of her mouth. The smell alone made my stomach churn. And by her side was a heart monitor, and other devices. She had a pulse.
I brushed sides with Kaylynn, trying to make sense of what we had discovered. The girl was a Vector, but she wasn’t dead. She had a heartbeat. She was alive!
The lights flashed on, nearly blinding us.
“Hello, children . . .”
Kaylynn and I turned around. Sam was at the door, holding a syringe in one hand and a pistol in the other. I whipped out my .45 and pointed back before she could aim. I’d never pointed a gun at a living person before.
For the first time in my life, I was truly horrified.
Sam stepped forward. A wide smile was spreading across her face. “I see you’ve met my daughter . . .”
Dad once told me, if I ever pointed a gun at someone, I had to be ready to pull the trigger. But now, for real, I knew I couldn’t bring myself to do it. If Sam would just step away from the door and let us go, we’d have no problem. But for reasons in front of me—and behind me—I could tell that her mind had long since left David City. Way to go, whoever put her in charge.
Maybe no one put her in charge.
I hugged the trigger of my .45 a little tighter.
Sam set her pistol next to a washbasin and raised her hands, still holding the syringe. “I knew you kids were too nosy for your own good.” She sidestepped to the other corner of the table, leaving the doorway open. “Now that you’ve freed your friend, what are you gonna do? You have nowhere else to go. You have no one to run to. You’ve just screwed yourselves.”
“What’re you doing to her?” Kaylynn asked, nodding at the girl.
“What am I doing for her, you mean,” Sam corrected. “I’m doing the same as you. I’m trying to keep her from slipping away from me. You should know, Kaylynn. You’re one of them.”
My grip tightened. “She’s no Vector. She’s alive.”
Sam laughed. “Do you think my daughter is?”
I didn’t want to know. I just wanted to get the hell out, but my feet were like glue on the linoleum floor.
“Do you know the medical definition of death?” Sam asked. “It’s when the vital organs stop: the liver, the brain, the heart. Take a good look at my daughter.” She motioned her hand at the thrashing girl. “Her heart is beating. She knows her Mamma when she sees me.”
The woman choked up. Tears filled her eyes.
“I’m sorry, Sam,” was all I could say. “Let us go—”
“What will you do?” Sam’s voice was bitter. “Fend for yourself? Kill off more people just because they’re suffering? Your little friend is infected, isn’t she? What will happen when she turns? What will you do then? Shoot her? Burn her in a pile with the rest of them?”
“I won’t let that happen!”
Sam closed in on the table. The girl still struggled as she neared, trying her best to reach Sam’s neck with her teeth. Sam reached out with her hand and ran her fingers through the girl’s hair. “I thought the same thing when I gave her my shotgun.” The girl growled as Sam pulled away. “When the dead first came to our town, I told her to stay put, but then she took off running to help a friend. I didn’t give her enough shells.” A tear fell down Sam’s cheek. “I should’ve been there . . .”
In a few short minutes, my impression of Sam had changed. She had the nerve to lecture us while she was holding a flesh-eating girl right in the heart of their headquarters? It became perfectly clear what Sam had planned to do with the syringe in her hand. The sedative wasn’t for Kaylynn. It was to control her daughter.
“You’re keeping her alive?” Kaylynn asked.
Nodding slightly, Sam wiped her eyes dry. “You’re a smart girl, Kaylynn. Constant sleep slows the process. If we keep her watered and fed, why—her cells will keep restoring and everything. We can’t assume they’re gone and treat these monsters like target practice. She’s still fighting against it now.” Sam stuck the syringe into the girl’s IV line. “Life is a gift. It needs to be nurtured and valued.” Her smile widened as the infected girl lay still. “We must value every life, no matter what . . .”
My hands trembled so bad that I couldn’t aim. Within seconds,
the infected girl calmed down and closed her eyes, back to the peaceful state we’d found her in. This didn’t reassure me. I wanted to get out.
I looked at Kaylynn and gestured at the door.
We slowly made our way to the exit while Sam was caressing the head of her near-dead daughter. She didn’t look at us. Or speak. She was in a trance. I reached back for the door handle and pulled. It wouldn’t budge.
I pocketed my Beretta and tried with both hands. Even with Kaylynn’s help, we couldn’t open the door. Then, so faint I could barely hear it, a rifle round went off—a big one, probably from the roof where the sniper perched. Radio static filled the room from Sam’s belt, and a second and a third round sounded off in the distance. I lost count when the automatic fire blared.
Kaylynn clenched my hand, looking at me in panic. I read her mind. A horde was coming our way.
“Samantha!” Mason said on the two-way radio. “We have a breach on the east side!” Other rounds of all calibers went off, nearly suppressing his voice. “We need—”
Click.
My eyes shot back to the table. Sam had turned off her radio, and began to laugh. I didn’t see the humor. The Vectors had come to invade the city. And Jewel was out there! I went for the door handle and pulled with all my might. Sam’s laughter softened to silence.
“We modified the door to open one way, in case she were to fall out of bed,” Sam said. Before the news was embedded in my mind, Sam removed the girl’s mask, IV, and every strap that held her down. “It was a matter of time before we lost this town,” she sang. “We’re out of sedatives. No one is coming for us. No more hiding. Whatever happens now is up to God.”
Did she really have to bring God into this?
She had given up. Just like that. Not me.
I banged on the door again, hoping beyond hope that Jewel would hear me from the other side. The lights flickered until they went out completely, throwing us into darkness. Sam laughed all the while. Kaylynn squeezed my hand, but I couldn’t let her hold it for long. Without lights, we were no better than caged Vector meat. Taking up my Beretta, I aimed at the door.
My Zombie Summer (Book 1): The Undead Road Page 8
